Mutated Virus Helps Build a Better Battery

A benign bacteria virus serves as a template in water to grow manganese oxide nanowires that, when combined with palladium, increases the energy potential of a lithium battery.

MIT

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What do smart phones, electric vehicles and solar panels have in common? They all demand more and more battery power to keep our homes, jobs and vehicles running. Lithium ion is still the "gold standard," but researchers are looking at the entire periodic table for new combinations of elements that can conduct and store electrons in smarter ways. And the sooner they find it, the sooner society can get off fossil fuels and use more sustainable energy sources.
“With the combination of new materials, new design concepts, and new production and manufacturing methodologies, I believe we will get there,” said Esther Takeuchim, professor of advanced power systems at SUNY Buffalo,
Here’s a look at five new battery techs – some ready for market in the next year, others just over the horizon:

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Lithium Imide
When Leyden Energy’s Noam Kedem was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, he was struck by the fact that almost nobody could talk on the phone after 3 p.m. "Everyone was running from charger to charger," Kedem said.
To meet the demand for more power and longer life, Fremont, Calif.,-based Leyden is using a unique electrolyte salt solution with existing lithium ion technology. Kedem says that doubles the number of laptop or cellphone battery charges from 350 cycles to more than 800. Kedem says their batteries can also operate up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit without producing hydrofluoric acid or the swelling that can occur when batteries heat up as they run multiple applications.
Canada’s Dr. Battery retailer began selling Leyden’s first rechargeable battery pack, and the firm is beginning mass production of tablet and cellphone batteries this year. Kedem says the firm is testing a prototype electric vehicle battery using the same electrolyte platform.

Leyden Energy

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Sodium Ion
Pittsburgh-based Aquion Energy is betting on simple, non-toxic materials for their grid storage battery system. "It’s made out saltwater, cotton, charcoal and dirt, actually lithium manganese oxide," said Ted Wiley, Aquion’s vice president of business development. "Everything we're made out of is cheap and staying cheap."
Aquion is building shipping-container-size storage cells for solar, wind and other renewable energy producers who need to store the electricity they make before selling it to the grid. It’s a hybrid battery using the food preservative, sodium sulfate, and is based on research coming out of Carnegie Mellon University’s school of engineering. This simple and inexpensive concept should also work to augment diesel generators in remote areas, Wiley said, or back up the power supply of homes and businesses.

Aquion Energy

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Solid State Lithium Ion
For electric vehicles, weight, range and safety are the big concerns. One idea is using solid state technology that doesn’t have a liquid electrolyte solution for a lithium-ion fuel cell. "That gives our cells greater energy density and also potentially reduces system complexity dramatically,” said Ann Marie Sastry, CEO of Ann Arbor-based Sakti3.
The firm's batteries pack more power into less space, said Sastry, a University of Michigan professor of materials science and engineering. There's no flammable material either, something that’s recently plagued the Chevy Volt’s battery. GM and Khosla Ventures are backing Sakti3’s research and development efforts.
Meanwhile in Japan, Toyota announced recently that its own solid state battery with a 600-mile range will be ready for roll-out sometime around 2015.

Sakti3

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Lithium Air
One materials scientist told me that lithium air is the "grand slam home run" of energy density. Lithium-air batteries differ from lithium-ion batteries in that they use carbon for their positive electrode instead of metal oxides. Carbon is lighter and reacts with oxygen in the surrounding air to produce electrical current. Although it promises a 1,000-mile range instead of just 125 miles for electric vehicles, lithium air batteries have also proven to be unstable.
The big problem is that lithium ignites when it contacts moist air. But IBM researchers in California and Switzerland reported this month that they have solved a key problem in the battery’s electrochemistry by finding a different kind of electrolyte solution. IBM hopes to have a prototype lithium-air battery by 2013. Startups like Berkeley-based PolyPlus are also hunting for this "holy grail" of battery tech. Critics say that lithium-air research has been underway for two decades without complete success.

IBM

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Magnesium Ion
Some researchers are looking beyond lithium. The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) is funding high-risk, high-reward technology, such as the magnesium ion battery being developed at Pellion Technologies, an MIT spin-off. Pellion says its batteries will have twice the energy density as existing lithium-ion batteries for both consumer products and electric vehicles. At the same time, Toyota researchers in Michigan say they are developing their own magnesium battery for an EV that can run twice the distance as current batteries on a single charge, but don’t expect it until 2020. The race is on.

By unleashing a genetically modified virus onto microscopic electrode wires, researchers from MIT have shown that the performance of lithium-air batteries can be significantly improved -- a remarkable breakthrough that could revolutionize the way our electric devices are powered.

Indeed, lithium-air batteries have generated considerable buzz over the years because of the way they can increase power without having to increase weight, an attribute that could lead to electric cars with much greater driving range. But engineers have struggled to to create the durable materials required for the batteries' electrodes, and increase the number of charging-cycles the batteries can withstand.

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To overcome these limitations, researchers from MIT demonstrated that by adding bioengineered viruses to nanowires during the production stage -- tiny electrode wires about the width of a red blood cell -- some of these problems could be alleviated.

This virus, called M13, works by increasing the surface area of the wire, which in turn increases the area where electrochemical activity takes place when batteries are charged or discharged.

In a process similar to how an abalone pulls calcium from seawater to grow its shell, the nanowires, with the help of the M13 virus, pulls molecules of metal from room-temperature water, which the virus then binds into specific structural shapes. Specifically, the viruses produce manganese oxide wires -- and they have the rough, spiky surface required for the desired increase in surface area.

This MIT-produced video illustrates it beautifully:

The final part of the process involves adding a small amount of metal, namely palladium, to increase the electrical conductivity of the nano wires.

Taken together, these modifications show that it may soon be possible to create a fully functional battery with an energy density that's two to three times greater than today's best lithium-air batteries -- the energy density being the amount of energy that can be stored for a given weight.